Ken Thompson

Kenneth Lane "Ken" Thompson born February 4, 1943, commonly referred to as ken in hacker circles,1 is an American pioneer of computer science Having worked at Bell Labs for most of his career, Thompson designed and implemented the original Unix operating system He also invented the B programming language, the direct predecessor to the C programming language, and was one of the creators and early developers of the Plan 9 operating systems Since 2006, Thompson has worked at Google, where he co-invented the Go programming language

Other notable contributions included his work on regular expressions and early computer text editors QED and ed, the definition of the UTF-8 encoding, his work on computer chess that included creation of endgame tablebases and the chess machine Belle

Contents

1 Biography

11 Early life

12 1960s

13 1970s

14 1980s

15 1990s

16 2000s

2 Awards

21 National Academy of Engineering

22 Turing Award

23 IEEE Richard W Hamming Medal

24 Fellow of the Computer History Museum

25 National Medal of Technology

26 Tsutomu Kanai Award

27 Japan Prize

3 See also

4 References

5 External links

Biographyedit

Early lifeedit

Thompson was born in New Orleans When asked how he learned to program, Thompson stated, "I was always fascinated with logic and even in grade school I'd work on arithmetic problems in binary, stuff like that Just because I was fascinated"2

1960sedit

DEC PDP-7, as used for initial work on Unix

Thompson received a Bachelor of Science in 1965 and a Master's degree in 1966, both in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, from the University of California, Berkeley, where his master's thesis advisor was Elwyn Berlekamp3

Thompson was hired by Bell Labs in 19664 In the 1960s at Bell Labs, Thompson and Dennis Ritchie worked on the Multics operating system While writing Multics, Thompson created the Bon programming language5 And he also created a video game called Space Travel Later on Bell Labs withdrew from the MULTICS project In order to go on playing the game, Thompson found an old PDP-7 machine and rewrote Space Travel on it6 Finally, the tools developed by Thompson became the Unix operating system: Working on a PDP-7, a team of Bell Labs researchers led by Thompson and Ritchie, and including Rudd Canaday, developed a hierarchical file system, the concepts of computer processes and device files, a command-line interpreter, and some small utility programs In 1970, Brian Kernighan suggested the name "Unix", in a somewhat treacherous pun on the name "Multics"7 After initial work on Unix, Thompson decided that Unix needed a system programming language and created B, a precursor to Ritchie's C8

In the 1960s, Thompson also began work on regular expressions Thompson had developed the CTSS version of the editor QED, which included regular expressions for searching text QED and Thompson's later editor ed the standard text editor on Unix contributed greatly to the eventual popularity of regular expressions, and regular expressions became pervasive in Unix text processing programs Almost all programs that work with regular expressions today use some variant of Thompson's notation He also invented Thompson's construction algorithm used for converting regular expression into nondeterministic finite automaton in order to make expression matching faster9

1970sedit

Ken Thompson sitting and Dennis Ritchie working together at a PDP-11
Version 6 Unix running on the SIMH PDP-11 simulator, with "/usr/ken" still present

Throughout the 1970s, Thompson and Ritchie collaborated on the Unix operating system; they were so influential on Research Unix that Doug McIlroy later wrote, "The names of Ritchie and Thompson may safely be assumed to be attached to almost everything not otherwise attributed"10 In a 2011 interview, Thompson stated that the first versions of Unix were written by him, and that Ritchie began to advocate for the system and helped to develop it:11

I did the first of two or three versions of UNIX all alone And Dennis became an evangelist Then there was a rewrite in a higher-level language that would come to be called C He worked mostly on the language and on the I/O system, and I worked on all the rest of the operating system That was for the PDP-11, which was serendipitous, because that was the computer that took over the academic community

Feedback from Thompson's Unix development was also instrumental in the development of the C programming language Thompson would later say that the C language "grew up with one of the rewritings of the system and, as such, it became perfect for writing systems"11

In 1975, Thompson took a sabbatical from Bell Labs and went to his alma mater, UC Berkeley There, he helped to install Version 6 Unix on a PDP-11/70 Unix at Berkeley would later become maintained as its own system, known as the Berkeley Software Distribution BSD12

Along with Joseph Condon, Thompson created the hardware and software for Belle, a world champion chess computer13 He also wrote programs for generating the complete enumeration of chess endings, known as endgame tablebases, for all 4, 5, and 6-piece endings, allowing chess-playing computer programs to make "perfect" moves once a position stored in them is reached Later, with the help of chess endgame expert John Roycroft, Thompson distributed his first results on CD-ROM

1980sedit

Plan 9 from Bell Labs, running the acme text editor, and the rc shell

Throughout the 1980s, Thompson and Ritchie continued revising Research Unix, which adopted a BSD codebase for the 8th, 9th, and 10th editions In the mid-1980s, work began at Bell Labs on a new operating system as a replacement for Unix Thompson was instrumental in the design and implementation of the Plan 9 from Bell Labs, a new operating system utilizing principles of Unix, but applying them more broadly to all major system facilities Some programs that were part of later versions of Research Unix, such as mk and rc, were also incorporated into Plan 9

Thompson tested early versions of the C++ programming language for Bjarne Stroustrup by writing programs in it, but later refused to work in C++ due to frequent incompatibilities between versions In a 2009 interview, Thompson expressed a negative view of C++, stating, "It does a lot of things half well and it's just a garbage heap of ideas that are mutually exclusive"14

1990sedit

In 1992, Thompson developed the UTF-8 encoding scheme together with Rob Pike15 The UTF-8 encoding has become the dominant character encoding for the World Wide Web, accounting for more than half of all web pages16

In the 1990s, work began on the Inferno operating system, another research operating system that was based around a portable virtual machine Thompson and Ritchie continued their collaboration with Inferno, along with other researchers at Bell Labs17

2000sedit

In late 2000, Thompson retired from Bell Labs He worked at Entrisphere, Inc as a fellow until 2006 and now works at Google as a Distinguished Engineer Recent work has included the co-design of the Go programming language Referring to himself along with the other original authors of Go, he states:11

When the three of us Thompson, Rob Pike, and Robert Griesemer got started, it was pure research The three of us got together and decided that we hated C++ laughter Returning to Go, we started off with the idea that all three of us had to be talked into every feature in the language, so there was no extraneous garbage put into the language for any reason

According to a 2009 interview, Thompson now uses a Linux-based operating system18

Awardsedit

National Academy of Engineeringedit

In 1980, Thompson was elected to the National Academy of Engineering for "designing UNIX, an operating system whose efficiency, breadth, power, and style have guided a generation's exploitation of minicomputers"19

Turing Awardedit

In 1983, Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the Turing Award "for their development of generic operating systems theory and specifically for the implementation of the UNIX operating system" His acceptance speech, "Reflections on Trusting Trust" presented the backdoor attack now known as the Thompson hack or trusting trust attack, and is widely considered a seminal computer security work in its own right20

IEEE Richard W Hamming Medaledit

In 1990, both Thompson and Dennis Ritchie received the IEEE Richard W Hamming Medal from the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers IEEE, "for the origination of the UNIX operating system and the C programming language"21

Fellow of the Computer History Museumedit

In 1997, both Thompson and Ritchie were inducted as Fellows of the Computer History Museum for "the co-creation of the UNIX operating system, and for development of the C programming language"22

National Medal of Technologyedit

On April 27, 1999, Thompson and Ritchie jointly received the 1998 National Medal of Technology from President Bill Clinton for co-inventing the UNIX operating system and the C programming language which together have led to enormous advances in computer hardware, software, and networking systems and stimulated growth of an entire industry, thereby enhancing American leadership in the Information Age23

Tsutomu Kanai Awardedit

In 1999, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers chose Thompson to receive the first Tsutomu Kanai Award "for his role in creating the UNIX operating system, which for decades has been a key platform for distributed systems work"24

Japan Prizeedit

In 2011 Ken Thompson, along with Dennis Ritchie, was awarded the Japan Prize for Information and Communications for the pioneering work in the development of the Unix operating system25